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5 Laws oftrauma Jeannie Suk Major Rhonda Cornum was at war in the Persian Gulf. In February 1991, the thirty-six-year-old US Army flight surgeon was on a Blackhawk helicopter in Iraqi airspace, leading her battalion in a search and rescue mission for a downed F-16 pilot. The helicopter came under enemy fire and crashed, killing most of her fellow soldiers onboard. Major Cornum survived . Saddam’s forces took her as she climbed out of the wreckage with broken limbs, a gunshot wound, and blood all over her face. While a captive , she was sexually assaulted.1 Two decades later, when I meet Brigadier General Cornum in her impressive Defense Department office, she is in battle-dress camouflage and wears none of her many decorations. She looks like she jumps out of planes for fun. She refers easily, with casual bravado, even, to having been brutalized as a prisoner of war.There are no guarded euphemisms from this slim, slightly elfin woman warrior, an MD and PhD with specialties in urology, biochemistry, and nutrition. She sounds as traumatized by her experience as one might be by an unpleasant root canal. She has suffered no posttraumatic stress, she says—none at all. I comment that she appears to be a remarkably resilient person, and she stops, bemused but kind.“It’s not just an appearance. I really am this resilient.” A decade into our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cornum was the director of a groundbreaking $125 million training program the army had just created.Comprehensive Soldier Fitness was her brainchild.Its purpose is to tackle the increasingly publicized epidemic of soldiers coming home from war devastated by posttraumatic stress that leads to addiction, family violence , crime, and suicide.The goal is to train soldiers in resilience—mental and emotional toughness—before they deploy. Just as the army has always Laws of Trauma 213 trained soldiers to be physically fit, it now believes it necessary to train for psychological strength, as preparation for war combat and life afterward. The idea is that when soldiers then experience the horrors of war, they will have the skills to avoid developing posttraumatic stress disorder.2 Cornum’s example makes her the perfect person to spearhead this first US military effort to teach emotional resilience. She preaches what she practices, projecting to a new generation of soldiers that they do not have to be psychologically destroyed by adverse events. Not war, not rape. What makes Cornum’s refusal of trauma surprising has more to do with us than with her.In the past several decades,we have come to expect a story of psychological trauma in a victim of sexual assault, let alone one who was nearly killed in war and captured as a POW. Even a trauma skeptic would have trouble believing that a person who has been through that experience was not traumatized.Trauma is now our working assumption about the human consequences of such events. Colloquially, trauma may refer to an emotionally distressing or shocking experience.In medicalized language that has become popular,posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which psychiatrists first recognized to diagnose troubled Vietnam War veterans, exists when memory of an event causes suffering from uncontrollable symptoms such as depression, anxiety, nightmares, flashbacks, and insomnia.3 Although the psychological problems of veterans drove the push for the professional recognition of the PTSD diagnosis,4 it has been the women’s movement—with its focus on sexual violence—that has carried the language of trauma into both popular and legal conceptions of harm.Sex for women and war for men are the twin paths along which the idea of trauma has developed. Trauma has unprecedented currency in our time. The feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon has suggested that “all the signs of mass post-traumatic stress . . . characterize large numbers of women” because of potential or actual sexual violence.5 Up to a third of war veterans will suffer from PTSD in their lifetimes.6 A concept that our parents’ generation barely knew has become ubiquitous in our public discourse and in our law. Beyond the extremities of rape and war, trauma has increasingly become a common language in which our legal system and our culture make sense of how experiencing or witnessing events can harm people emotionally and later cause them to harm others.The women’s movement relied on the idea of trauma to achieve game-changing legal reforms in its signature realms of domestic violence, rape, acquaintance...

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